Summary/Abstract
Human-induced climate change is leading to an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, which are severely affecting the health of the population. The exceptional heat during the summer of 2022 in Europe is an example, with record-breaking temperatures only below the infamous 2003 summer. High ambient temperatures are associated with many health outcomes, including premature mortality. However, there is limited quantitative evidence on the contribution of anthropogenic activities to the substantial heat-related mortality observed in recent times.
In this peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Research Letters, the authors combine methods in climate epidemiology and attribution to quantify the heat-related mortality burden attributed to human-induced climate change in Switzerland during the summer of 2022. The study first estimates heat-mortality association in each canton and age/sex population between 1990 and 2017 in a two-stage time-series analysis. The authors then calculate the mortality attributed to heat in the summer of 2022 using observed mortality, and compare it with the hypothetical heat-related burden that would have occurred in absence of human-induced climate change. This counterfactual scenario was derived by regressing the Swiss average temperature against global mean temperature in both observations and CMIP6 models. The authors estimate 623 deaths due to heat between June and August 2022, corresponding to 3.5% of all-cause mortality. More importantly, the authors find that 60% of this burden (370 deaths) could have been avoided in absence of human-induced climate change. The study finds that older women were affected the most, as well as populations in western and southern Switzerland and more urbanized areas. The authors conclude that their findings demonstrate that human-induced climate change was a relevant driver of the exceptional excess health burden observed in the 2022 summer in Switzerland.